Feeding the Spirit. . . Slowly

Posted on April 3, 2013 by Ron Byrnes

Most days I’m bullish, in a two-thirds kinda way, on our future. But about a third of accelerating modernization worries me. For example, young people gravitate almost exclusively to high speed, visual media that leaves the future of non-visual slow mo media like National Public Radio extremely vulnerable.

This was painfully apparent the other day while I was listening to NPR while driving through downtown Bend, Oregon. I learned that the “Talk of the Nation” call in program was going off the air after 21 years. Something about a $7m debt. Next, as I drove back to Sunriver, I listened to a riveting, seemingly unbelievable (it was April 1st) story about a Portland State University student who got caught in a gruesome, downward sex trafficking spiral.

And I thought it was an exotic, mostly Southeast Asian story. I needed educating and was schooled by a memorable story that stuck with me the way powerful journalism does. Journalism that educates, pricks your conscience, and tugs at your emotions.

Youtube videos are often funny diversions from day-to-day life, but few rise to the level of powerful journalism.

I had to listen to the same station for twenty minutes and use my imagination to envision the young women’s harrowing story. Devalued attributes in today’s social media landscape.

I’m a frugal fool meaning my money saving strategies are sometimes irrational. So I identify closely with my friend who likes the Washington Post. I sent him a link to a recent article that described the Post’s new pay wall. He quickly fired back, “It will never work, I’ll just read the minimum number of articles and then turn to other news sites.”

But when it comes to the potential of our journalism to challenge our intellect, hold our public officials accountable, and sometimes even nourish our spirit, we get what we pay for.

I can’t help but wonder, no make that worry, about what happens to 21st Century media when young people are unwilling or unable to paint pictures for twenty minutes and their parents refuse to contribute to the salaries of the skilled men and women who excel at telling our stories.

The Best Get Rich Scheme You’ll Read About All Day

Posted on March 14, 2013 by Ron Byrnes

Huffington Post-like tabloid headline alert. By “best” I mean “only”, by “get rich” I mean have a little more money leftover at the end of the month, and by “scheme” I mean partner with your neighbor-friends to buy in bulk.

The Byrnes family likes them some guacamole. Avocados are usually $1.50 at the local grocery store, but are sometimes on sale for 99 cents. At Costco, six are $4.99. I believe in slow-mo, one 83 cent avocado at a time, financial improvement.

The problem of course is eating them before they go bad. One Costco shopper offered this tip in an on-line forum, “My technique is to put the newly purchased bag in the fridge for a week, and then take out one avocado and put it on the counter and keep a close eye on it. As soon as it feels a bit soft I use it up and take out another avocado. I’m surprised at how well this works for me.”

Overtime, buying avocados and many other consumer goods in bulk can lead to serious savings, but if you’re one or two people, or even a smallish family, avoiding waste is always a challenge. Which makes me wonder, why don’t individuals, couples, and/or families form informal neighborhood-based cooperatives to buy things much more cheaply in bulk? For example, someone buys two gallons of milk, six avocados, and a case of beer at Costco and walks over to their neighbors and gives them one gallon of milk, three avocados, and twelve bottles of beer for a few dollars savings.

Not a life-changing transaction, but it illustrates the concept. The key of course, is scaling the bulk buying up, and thereby, extending the savings.

There are a few imminently surmountable reasons for why this networking isn’t more common. People may not have close friends near by. Or people may have nearby friends, but be hesitant to buck the deep-seated individualism that’s ingrained in American life. Can we come together on which beer? Or maybe people don’t feel it’s worth taking non-working time to coordinate group Costco runs. Or like a solo car commuter whose resistant to join a carpool, maybe people don’t want to give up the freedom to shop on their own schedules.

It’s ironic that people’s wages aren’t keeping up with inflation and we’re living in the midst of a social media revolution and we don’t partner up more often to buy in bulk. Maybe necessity is the mother of invention. Maybe as young, tech savvy people struggle to achieve economic independence, informal bulk-buying neighborhood cooperatives will naturally bubble up.

Green goodness

Points to Ponder

Posted on April 18, 2012 by Ron Byrnes

• From Jonathan Haidt in the Happiness Hypothesis-Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom: Pleasure comes more from making progress toward goals than from achieving them.

• From The Atlantic: Loneliness and being alone are not the same thing, but both are on the rise. We meet fewer people. We gather less. And when we gather, our bonds are less meaningful and less easy. The decrease in confidants—that is, in quality social connections—has been dramatic over the past 25 years. In one survey, the mean size of networks of personal confidants decreased from 2.94 people in 1985 to 2.08 in 2004. Similarly, in 1985, only 10 percent of Americans said they had no one with whom to discuss important matters, and 15 percent said they had only one such good friend. By 2004, 25 percent had nobody to talk to, and 20 percent had only one confidant. [strong counter argument]

• From Sports Illustrated: It’s hard to come up with any measure sufficient to characterize the strength of the Kenyan marathon army, but try this: Sixteen American men in history have run faster than 2:10 (a 4:58 per mile pace); 38 Kenyan men did it in October.

Grit follow up. In Monday’s Boston Marathon, the dude on the far left, Michel Butter, from the Nederlands, was hangin with the Kenyans. Pre-race, the Dutch track federation told him if he finished in the top ten they’d put him on the Olympic team. He finished seventh because of training sessions like this one.

Correction from the exceptional The Science of Sport blog: Michel Butter’s requirement was either to run 2:10, or finish in the top 8 with a 2:12 or faster. He ran 2:16:38 for 7th. So he got the place, but missed the time, and hence the Olympic spot. That’s a bitter pill to swallow, because as I mentioned earlier, the elite men were 7.8% slower than last year’s times, and about 5% slower than their typical race times. Butter missed the target time by 5.1% (the 2:12 standard). Bearing this mind, and that Boston is typically a slower course than the flat races of Rotterdam, London, Berlin etc, I would use discretion and pick him anyway…

Social Media Scorecard

Posted on February 8, 2012 by Ron Byrnes

Me evaluating social media is like Rosanne Barr evaluating singers of the National Anthem. I’m old and hopelessly behind the curve, a late, late adaptor, better suited to anti-social media. Plus I’m skeptical by nature and my experience with the different sites is limited.

Facebook. Not only am I skeptical, I dig solitude, and I have non-conformist tendencies. So when everyone began telling me I HAD to get a Facebook account, I figured that was good reason not to. Alas, six months or so ago, a close friend from high school dragged me on. I have very few Facebook friends compared to you. I’m not sure why, but until recently, I’ve been checking it a couple of times a day. It’s been nice learning what some old friends are up to and since my blog posts appear on my friends’ pages I’ve seen a slight uptick in readership.

Sorry Zuckerberg, apart from that, the negative side of the ledger is much more substantial. I don’t feel like I’ve really reconnected with any old friends on any meaningful level and the quality of content is weak. Once you friend someone you have no control over how many times they post in a given day and the quality of those posts. Far too few add meaning to my life. Worse than that, they’re a distraction from life writ large. Not that my content is so spectacular. I’m sure some of my friends would prefer not getting a link to every blog post I write. It’s like being on a landline, having wires crossed up, and listening into another conversation. Fun! For two minutes listening to two other peeps. No so much when it’s hundreds of people all day and night. I assume Facebook fanatics, for which there are hundreds of million, learn how to read very selectively. Instantaneously processing value within an incessant content stream is a modern skill I don’t really want to develop.

Conclusion—Facebook has detracted more than it’s added. Allegedly worth $100b, so I’m in the minority. That’s cool, I’m comfortable there. Final grade, D.

LinkedIn. A former student kept asking me to link with her, then a few other people, and I eventually waved the white flag and created an account about the same time I first Facebooked. Again, you have more contacts than me. I suck at networking maybe because I just want to be left alone most of the time. Also, I don’t like the design of the site, too busy and confusing. Maybe if I was 24 and looking for a job I’d think differently about it, but I rarely check it. It’s added little to no value to my life. Yet a passing grade because it hasn’t really detracted either. Final grade, C-.

Twitter. Just when you thought I was a lost cause, a social medium I’m completely down with. There’s a special place in heaven for whomever came up with the 140 character limit. I’ve just started following people and orgs including Bill Simmons, the Lonely Planet, some newspaper reporters, and a UCLA sports website. So nice to learn instantaneously useful tips for driving in Brazil and which UCLA team has lost. Bonus points for the minimalist design and ease of use. It’s a snap to add and remove people, no “defriending” drama. I may just get a tat of the Twitter logo sometime soon. If Facebook is worth 100b, Twitter is a 1t company. Final grade, B. Would have been higher, but I deducted points because too many purveyors (or is it perve-veyors) of porn are slipping through in the form of new followers.

Postscript and related link—On a recent morning, while cycling, I watched a documentary about the current status and probable future direction of journalism titled “Inside the New York Times”. David Carr, the Times media writer, played a central role. I now follow him on Twitter. I really liked this blog post from him on the limits of on-line friendship. Highly recommended.

Love and Social Media

Posted on June 1, 2011 by Ron Byrnes

If Jonathan Franzen writes it, I want to read it. In a recent NYT essay he gives voice to what I’ve been thinking, that social media compromise intimacy. An excerpt:

. . . Very probably, you’re sick to death of hearing social media disrespected by cranky 51-year-olds. My aim here is mainly to set up a contrast between the narcissistic tendencies of technology and the problem of actual love. My friend Alice Sebold likes to talk about “getting down in the pit and loving somebody.” She has in mind the dirt that love inevitably splatters on the mirror of our self-regard.

The simple fact of the matter is that trying to be perfectly likable is incompatible with loving relationships. Sooner or later, for example, you’re going to find yourself in a hideous, screaming fight, and you’ll hear coming out of your mouth things that you yourself don’t like at all, things that shatter your self-image as a fair, kind, cool, attractive, in-control, funny, likable person. Something realer than likability has come out in you, and suddenly you’re having an actual life.

Suddenly there’s a real choice to be made, not a fake consumer choice between a BlackBerry and an iPhone, but a question: Do I love this person? And, for the other person, does this person love me?

There is no such thing as a person whose real self you like every particle of. This is why a world of liking is ultimately a lie. But there is such a thing as a person whose real self you love every particle of. And this is why love is such an existential threat to the techno-consumerist order: it exposes the lie.

This is not to say that love is only about fighting. Love is about bottomless empathy, born out of the heart’s revelation that another person is every bit as real as you are.

Usually, when I walk down the classroom hallways of my university, students line the walls, sitting or standing, eyes almost uniformly on their phones. And last week, at the GalPal’s end-of-the-year Spanish language program fiesta, I studied a fifty-something couple as they watched their granddaughter in a skit from adjacent tables. They watched her for a few seconds then quickly turned to their separate smart phones and never looked up for the remainder of the program. Only physically were they in same elementary school lunchroom as the rest of us.

No doubt, texting is usually easier than talking face-to-face, but is it healthier? I’m less convinced than Franzen that arms-length social media forms of interacting are necessarily worse than traditional face-to-face forms. I support the harshest possible penalties for high speed social media usage, but when it comes to stationary texting, talking, and Facebooking, I suspect Franzen is overstating the costs.

Is the obvious decline in eye contact and face-to-face conversation inevitably negative or just different? What indicators might help us answer that question?

If nothing else, at some point, young people will unplug at least long enough to satiate their built-in animal desire for physical intimacy. Unless of course, there’s a new app for that.

Contemporary Challenges to Writing Well

Posted on December 24, 2010 by Ron Byrnes

Follow up to the previous post, “Writing Hard”.

When working on their drafts, I ask my writing students to continually self-assess whether they’ve been sufficiently introspective and whether they have interesting ideas to communicate.

Sufficient introspection is tough for an increasing number of students who are unable to unplug for any time of real consequence. For some of my students, not texting for an hour and forty-five minutes is excruciating. I wonder, how introspective can one be when alternating between texting, talking, listening to music, facebooking, tweeting, watching youtubes most recent viral videos, or streaming films?

A second challenge is sufficient exposure to complex and challenging content. This challenge takes two forms—the quality of curriculum materials in school and the personal choices made outside of school.

With respect to the later, young people watch a lot more television and movies than they do read. That’s not inevitably negative, depending on the relative quality of their preferred television programming and movies.

Extrapolating from my students and my daughters and their friends, today adolescents tend to watch television and films that fail the complex and challenging test.

Again I wonder, if they’re unable to unplug and they’re switching between Gossip Girls, Camp Rock, and Legally Blonde (my frame of reference is admittedly female) what can we expect from them in terms of interesting ideas?

Postscript: I’m not immune from these challenges, particularly unplugging. I am too easily distracted. That partially explains why it took me so long to FINALLY finish Franzen’s Freedom. Whew, masterful. Worth noting, he said he worked on it in an office without an internet connection. Currently I’m reading The Emperor of all Maladies: A Biography of Cancer. And last night the family and labradude gathered for this excellent film. Fifteen was NOT happy it was subtitled, but she dug deep and read for the whole 2 hours. She’s still not quite forgiven the Galpal and I for subjecting her to this excellent film five years ago.

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays.